


Ladybird, Ladybird

by SoloMoon



Series: The Persistence of Memory [1]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Aftermath of yeerk infestation, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hypnagogic Hallucinations, Magical Realism, POV Minor Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-08
Updated: 2019-08-08
Packaged: 2020-08-13 01:54:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20166202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SoloMoon/pseuds/SoloMoon
Summary: After the end of the war, Jean Berenson struggles to come home.  She knows that she failed her son, and only wishes that she'd stop hearing his voice in the night.Jake's mother's perspective on Tom's death.





	Ladybird, Ladybird

**Author's Note:**

> In #54, Jake says "I bought a house for my folks and finally moved out on my own. Tom was gone. My hanging around my parents' house till I was thirty wasn't going to bring him back." This fic is my expansion of that moment.
> 
> The title comes from the [children's rhyme](https://www.antlionpit.com/folklore.html#origins).

For the first time since the war, Jean's dream about Tom is a good one. The dream itself is nothing special. She's lying out on the sun-soaked lawn on a Saturday morning with her chubby six-year-old pushed up against her body, wiggly and snuggly. No day in particular, she doesn’t think. Just an aggregate: memory, imagination, longing.

“Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home…” he sings in her dream, pulling petals from a flower one by one. "Your house is on fire, your children all gone." Jean doesn’t have the heart to tell him that he’s doing it wrong.

Normally, the dreams are about Tom crying out somewhere Jean can't reach to help. Normally she hears him screaming, just down the hall, on the ragged edges of her sleep.

It's not hard to figure out what those dreams mean. They started too late, but they warn her anyway. That her little boy was hurt. That he was in pain. That even as he sat across the kitchen table with the corners of his mouth pulled into a smile, he was begging her for help so loudly that the black thing inside him had to hurt him just to shut him up.

_Mommy, I’m hurt. Mommy, I’m scared. Help me, Mommy._

And Jean didn’t hear, back then. She didn’t know. She couldn’t fling herself halfway out of bed the way she did the other night, half-asleep, half-frantic, murmuring to Steve, “Just gotta check on the boys—” Before she remembered. That Tom is dead. That Jake…

Jake doesn’t need her help anymore.

Anyway, Jean wakes gently this time. And she thinks maybe this is the first sign of healing. That maybe she’s crested to that place where the memories become treasures rather than shards. She’s heard that can happen, from her counseling group.

The dream was still sad, of course. The memory of it, slanting gold sun over Tom’s tiny fists and dark curls, awakes an emptiness inside her. It probably always will.

Because that’s what grief is: a thousand shades of regret. Sometimes even regret for the regret. “I just want to stop feeling this way,” Jean told her therapist once, before slamming her hand over her mouth too late to keep the words inside.

It’s been almost two years. Maybe it’s time for it to start to hurt less.

“Jeannie? You all right?” Steve sits up next to her, fumbles to slide his glasses on so that he can make out her expression.

“Sure.” She presses a hand to her face, unsurprised to find last night’s salt tracks painted on her cheeks. “Sure, honey. I’ll get breakfast going, yeah? You get Jake up this time.”

* * *

There still are four chairs at their kitchen table. Again, Jean reaches down four plates before breakfast. Again, she finds she lacks the strength to lift and put the extra one back.

It sits there on the counter, more often than not, a silent testimony throughout their meals.

“Thanks, Mom,” her son’s murderer says. He smiles up at her, mouth still full of pancake. “These are really good.”

* * *

It was a mercy kill, according to the newspapers. Or else, it was self-defense. When feeling charitable, Jean thinks _defense of an innocent life_ might apply. But then, who’s innocent? Tom was, when Rachel’s blow cut through his spine.

“That’s great, sweetheart,” Jean says, no inflection to her voice.

Jake sets the scrap of gilded aluminum on the mantelpiece and walks away. It’s a Medal of Honor.

Apparently that’s the going price for fratricide, these days.

* * *

“Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home,” Tom recites in her dreams. He crouches over a blade of grass with the kind of intensity only a four-year-old can muster. “Your house is on fire, your children all gone. All but the little one, asleep in his bed. Fly away now, before he is dead.”

_I know_, Jean thinks, when she wakes. _Baby, I know now_. It’s not enough, it’s too late. But at least now she knows that all along her home did burn.

* * *

The rabbi speaks of the deaths of the firstborn. How the Angel of Mercy came through Egypt, and took the eldest son from every home. How that was what it took to be free. How the Israelis had to learn to cling tight to what they had left, even when flung from their homes.

Jean doesn’t think of Passover, when she looks at Jake. She doesn’t think of Teshuva. She thinks of God asking after Abel: Where has your brother gone? Thinks of how Cain had one last chance to repent and confess, and of how pride made him refuse.

Eve cast him out, after that happened. She had no choice, really, with her baby’s blood crying out from the land.

* * *

There’s footage of her son’s death. Footage, and everyone has seen it. Jean only knows because her sister-in-law called to tell her.

Rage choked Naomi’s voice through the tears, that whole conversation. “How dare they,” Naomi said. “How dare those bastards think they can… they can…”

_It was a mercy kill_, CNN says, or _it was love_, or _at least he tried_.

Anyway, Jean's not surprised that they dare. That her coworkers, her greengrocer, her next-door neighbors have all watched her son die, somewhere between the weather and the six o’clock news. It fits, given the way they look at her and then look away.

* * *

Jake gives her things all the time, these days. He custom-orders a new lawn mower. Slides million-dollar checks across the kitchen counter. Sets a twenty-carat diamond gifted by the Queen of England into the hand-carved bowl for Jean’s car keys.

(Jean snatched the diamond out, the instant he left the room. It’d felt like blasphemy; the letters _T-O-M-M-Y_ carved on the underside of the bowl made it no place for such blood money. She dropped the jewel in the trash, not knowing what else to do.)

Today it’s something new. Today, Jake presses an envelope onto the table between her and Steve. “It’s upstate a little ways,” he says. “Santa Barbara. You don’t have to move if you don’t want, but I paid it off in full, and I figured…”

Figured _what_, Jean would like to know. Figured that they’d abandon their home, abandon its memories of Tom, in exchange for this latest guilt gift?

“Thanks, kiddo.” Steve sounds like he means it, which hurts. “We really appreciate this.”

* * *

Jean is running up the stairs before she consciously registers why. It is daytime, and there was a noise from Tom’s room. She’s awake. But she heard the half-muffled sob, and it came from the empty bedroom at the end of the hall.

It’s the middle of the afternoon. She’s not dreaming. Her baby is calling out to her, and she can reach him.

When she wrenches the door open, she freezes.

Jake stands amidst the wreckage of Tom’s possessions. A box sits at his feet, half filled with t-shirts and basketball trophies. The tears on his face are fresh-flowing, badly muffled.

“What are you doing in here.” Jean’s voice comes out hard-edged and cold. Trembling behind her words: How dare you. How _dare_ you.

It was all arranged, exactly how it should be. Clothes in the closet. Gameboy in the desk drawer. Bed made. All his things where they belonged.

Jake moved it all. Jake touched it. Defiled it. Ruined it.

“I was just…” Jake swallows hard. Rubs his wrist over both cheeks. He’s still got one of Tom’s sweatshirts in hand; how _dare_ he. “Just figured we could sort through all this, see what makes sense to keep when we move and what…”

“Get out.” Jean doesn’t recognize the woman speaking with her voice. All she knows is this: she’s giving it up. Motherhood has brought her nothing but pain. It’s high time she relinquished it. _She_ will box up Tom’s things to donate or destroy. _She_ will make the call about what stays, and she will get rid of the things that need to go.

Starting with Tom’s killer.

“Get out,” she says again.

“Yeah.” Jake takes a breath. “Yeah. Okay. Sorry, I’ll let you finish up.”

_GET OUT OF MY HOUSE_, she screams inside, when she realizes he doesn’t understand. _GET OUT OF MY LIFE._

“You’re eighteen,” she forces herself to say. “It’s high time you found your own place. And goodness knows you can afford it. Your father and I will take the house in Santa Barbara. You can find your own place.”

Something happens on Jake’s face then. Something vulnerable breaks. Stops being wounded, because now it is dead.

She’s ready, now. To stop being _Mom_, to anyone or anything. To box up her sons and throw them away. To learn, all over, what it is to be Jean. Jean with the potted plant on her desk. Jean who leaves little presents for the sanitation workers. Jean the writer. Jean the wife. Jean, herself and nothing else. She’s done with pain. Done with love. Done with _Mommy, help me_.

It takes Jake less than a day to pack up and leave. Neither one of them explains it to Steve.

* * *

Fool, fool. Your house is on fire.

It’s Steve who answers the door, when the cops’ hard knock shatters the quiet of their new kitchen. Steve whose voice wavers as he says, “What do you mean, _missing and presumed_?” Steve who whispers, “Thank you for letting us know.”

Steve who holds her, when the air leaves her body as a senseless scream of disbelief and pain. When she rocks on the floor, moaning, whimpering, like a wounded animal.

_Jean, you fool_. Fool, to think she could cut him out of her heart. What a fool, to think she could ever not care.

Jake. Jake. Her baby boy. Her clumsy, solemn, second child. Her only son.

_Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home_, Steve once recorded Tom saying, his little voice lisping, the tape hissing. _All but the little one, asleep in his bed. Fly away now—_

But she never dreams about it again. The warning only lasted while there was still time to warn her.

Instead she sleeps, and hears both their voices crying in the night.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is cross-posted from [tumblr](https://thejakeformerlyknownasprince.tumblr.com/post/179423210329/ladybird-ladybird).


End file.
